Aims: I want to understand what makes the world of LOTR 'magical' (using the term loosely). How did Tolkien weave Faërie into a Middle-earth recognizable as our own? How did he craft a modern fairy-story?

These questions fit nicely with an essay in honour of Verlyn Flieger, who has done more than anyone to answer them. But at crucial points Flieger seems to stop short of bringing out the full implications of her thought or of connecting the dots between different parts of it. Focusing on elements of Middle-earth that Flieger has not considered (e.g. Emyn Beraid), our essay is essentially a critical engagement with Flieger's main ideas, which all, in one way or another, concern the role of time in Tolkien's fairy stories.

Places and things in Middle-earth: We need to arrive at some general principles, but we must do so through focusing on specifics.

My initial interest concerned Emyn Beraid - the Tower Hills that house, first the Seeing-Stone, and then the Red Book, and which appear in Frodo's dream at Crickhollow. The Seeing-Stone provided a "direct site" of Valinor, while the Red Book includes the text (LOTR) we are investigating. My initial thought was that the Palantir's direct vision of Faërie over the ocean brought Faërie into Middle-earth.

Encounter with Flieger's second book prompted me to add Lothlórien, the central position of which contrasts with the location of Emyn Beraid on the edge of Middle-earth. In the magical mirror of Lothlórien's fairy queen, Frodo sees Elendil's arrival on Middle-earth (in the ship that in fact carries the Seeing-Stone) and another ship departing (and carrying Frodo) - again reiterating the underlying connection of Middle-earth with magical lands in the West. However, and as will become clear, Flieger's books have led me to see the relationship of Faërie and Middle-earth somewhat differently.

Recently a number of other places and scenes have been brought into focus. I am struck with Tom Hillman's reading of the realm of Tom Bombadil (the Old Forest, his house, and the Barrow Downs), which brings out the enchanted and often perilous nature of this realm, thereby showing us a non-Elven Faërie that contrasts with Lothlórien: the Elves are immortal, and in Lothlórien the ancient days are still present; but TB is 'the eldest', the Ring has no effect on him, and in his realm there is no unnatural resistance to change (note also that nobody dreams in Lothlórien, whereas dreams are especially present in the house of TB). Other places and scenes (e.g. the Dead Marshes, Faramir's vision of the departure of Boromir, Mirrormere, or Frodo's experience of the music at Rivendell) have also been brought into view. All discussions of these additional parts of 'the Red Book' have been rich and useful. Nevertheless, we need to be cautious of multiplying textual references and thereby diluting our focus before we have arrived at clear ideas.

Flieger has published two collections of essays (Green Suns and Faerie and Interrupted Music) and two monographs: Splintered Light (1983; revised edition 2002) and A Question of Time (1997). Here I focus only on the two monographs, both of which bring the element of time into central prominence.

Splintered Light (SL) illuminates the myths that we know as The Silmarillion through relating Tolkien's vision to the theory of the perception and language set out in Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction (1928). Barfield posits primitive language as a 'semantic unity' in which all meanings are literal and yet expressive of an original mythic consciousness. Over time, the original holistic perception of the universe fragments ever further and the original mythic consciousness gradually transforms into modern disenchanted consciousness. The development of language is supposed to follow and embody this splintering of mythic perception, a process marked by the emergence of metaphor (a sign that myth is no longer literal). Flieger argues convincingly that Tolkien's technique in The Silmarillion:

is to first restore to words their primal unity of concept and then to set up a progressive fragmentation of both word and percept... His technique is to confer literality on what would in the primary world be called metaphor and then to illustrate the process by which the literal becomes metaphoric.

To give but one, albeit the most obvious illustration: if 'seeing the light' is now pure metaphor, for the Elves it was once a concrete literal reality, the result of a journey to Valinor from the Greater Lands where they had awakened.

Interestingly, Flieger does not dwell on the instance of 'splintering' most crucial for grasping the nature of the world of LOTR. Barfield's theory of language posits a slow process of splintering whereby an original mythic consciousness becomes our own disenchanted perception (governed by science and consoled by the metaphors of poetry): Myth gradually becomes History. If Tolkien's Silmarillion stories provide the original myths (at least for the North-Western part of the world), then the destruction of Númenor at the end of the Second Age and the bending of the 'straight road' between Middle-earth and Valinor marks a key moment when Myth dissolves into (legendary) History. From the Third Age onwards the myth of the undying lands in the West is rather metaphorical than literal truth.

What the myth of the bending of the straight road suggests is that the Middle-earth of the Third Age stands half-way between the mythic worlds of the First and Second Ages and our own disenchanted world. Just as we recognize in the Shire a familiar non-magical world, so as we travel through Middle-earth we find it shot through with myth, which endures undiminished in some pockets and may manifest itself anywhere.

We can bring this frame to bear upon the 'magical' objects contained in the Elf towers of Emyn-Beraid. As Oliver points out, both Seeing-Stone and Red Book are contained in this same location, the Palantír throughout the Third Age, the Red Book early on in the Fourth Age. Both are in some way windows on a vanished past - but both pasts and the nature of the window are very different.

The Seeing-Stone is a Palantír. Made in Valinor by Fëanor, in the Third Age it provides Elendil (and after him the Elves) with a "straight-site" to Valinor. It is a window on a mythical age now lost.

... to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimagiable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and the Golden were in flower! (Gandalf, 'The Palantír', Two Towers)

The Red Book too gives a glimpse into the past, but this past is mainly (not solely) that of the last years of the Third Age; and what is found in its pages relates, not to Valinor, but to Middle-earth. It might make use of an originally Elvish art (writing), and it is certainly shot through with magic (the nature of which we are trying to establish!), but it is the product of mortal hands and is far less magical than the Palantír that it replaces.

One last question on SL: if the destruction of Númenor and the bending of the 'straight way' is such a defining moment in Tolkien's vision of the passing of Myth into History, and as such crucial for framing the nature of Middle-earth in the Third Age, why does Flieger give it so little (none at all?) attention in SL? The answer, I think, is that SL was composed before the publication of the HOME series, and it was only after the publication of volumes 5 and 9 of this series (Lost Road and Sauron Defeated) that the centrality to Tolkien (especially in the 1930s) of the idea of Númenor and its destruction became evident.

A Question of Time, however, was published only after the entire 12 volumes of HOME had appeared in print. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Tolkien's reflections on the destruction of Númenor provide the starting-point of Flieger's second book.

A Question of Time (AQT) explores Tolkien's treatment of the interconnection of time past and present in his fairy stories - but only in those situated at the end of Númenor and after.

Flieger reminds us that a recurring theme in all Tolkien's fairy stories is the 'Elf-friend' who journeys, encounters Elves, and records their stories. Such Elf-friends include Frodo and Tolkien himself; but appear first in 'The Book of Lost Tales' (begun in 1917), which are supposedly recorded by an ancestral Englishman - first an Angle named Eriol ('one who dreams alone'), then an Anglo-Saxon named Aelfwine ('Elf-friend'). Around 1936, however, and in tandem with the introduction of the story of Númenor, a profound innovation occurs: the Elf-friend becomes a traveller in time as well as space.

This major innovation is introduced in Tolkien's "abortive book of time-travel" (Letters 347), 'The Lost Road', which Flieger identifies as Tolkien's "earliest explicit treatment of the reconnection of time present with time past and time future" (AQT 21). Tolkien's idea for 'The Lost Road' was to present a series of stories each treating of a father and son called (some version of) Bliss-friend and Elf-friend, stretching back from the present, through the known history of the North, all the way back to Elendil and the drowning of Númenor. The only extant chapters concern Elendil and his son Herendil, in Númenor, and Albion and his son Audoin, in the present. Of Albion we are told (in words that bear comparison with those of Dunne - on whom see below) that his most permanent mood since childhood has been:

the desire to go back. To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads; or to survey it, as men may see the world from a mountain, or the earth as a living map beneath an airship. But in any case to see with eyes and to hear with ears: to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, and hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before the days, when tongues of forgotten lineage were heard in kingdoms long fallen by the shores of the Atlantic. (Lost Road 49; original emphasis).

One evening, after musing on this desire, Albion "passed out of the waking world" and heard the voice of Elendil, who tells him that he and his son may indeed travel back in time - not by machines (the art of H.G. Wells and Sauron), but - we are to gather - by way of Dream.

Intriguingly - given our juxtaposition of Seeing-Stone and Red Book in the Elf-towers - Elendil insists that Albion shall travel with his son, Audoin: "for you are the ears and he is the eyes" (Lost Road 53). This reflects the different dreams of this father and son pair - while Audoin dreams visions of an unknown past, Albion dreams unknown languages.

In an extremely impressive display of research, Flieger shows that Tolkien derived his idea of time travel from the dream theory of J. W. Dunne's Experiment with Time (1927). As Jerry explains:

Dunne argues that all events in time take place simultaneously, and linearity is only the result of the limitations of natural human perception (waking consciousness). Linear events occurring in the 'present' along the 'natural' linear timeline of human waking consciousness are said by Dunne to occur in 'field 1' and to be observed by 'observer 1'. Anyone who can view 'observer 1' becomes 'observer 2', and so on in a nesting-doll manner... until the ultimate observer... is reached. Dunne suggests that if the human mind could break the bounds of its own limits of observation, it could free itself of linearity and... proceeds to argue that this is exactly what occurs during dreaming: the mind escapes linearity and travels to other events on the plain.

Thus the unknown images and words that come to Albion and Audoin (respectively) in dreams are to be understood as real fragments of a lost past. The subsequent adventure of time travel is (I think) but a heightened mode of such dreaming. Flieger suggests that "the figure of Elendil operates as what Dunne called the ultimate observer, within whom the other observing consciousnesses are contained" (AQT 83).

In AQT, Flieger suggests that Tolkien put aside the time-travel idea until, on reaching Lothlórien when writing the LOTR, "it surfaced again" (AQT 88, 92). Actually, by her own lights this is misleading because, as she later shows, Frodo's dreams at Crickhollow and the house of TB (i.e. before Lothlórien) also make use of Dunne's theories. But before turning to LOTR it is important to appreciate the significance of the introduction of the story of Númenor in 'The Lost Road'.

The destruction of Númenor of The Lost Road is not the transition within the legendarium from Second to Third Age that it would later become, but rather a single cataclysm marking the meeting point of Myth and History, or, if you want, of the theories of Barfield and Dunne. Barfield helped Tolkien move from an original world of total Myth, through a process of gradual disenchantment, to the beginning of History in the North. Dunne helped Tolkien move from the present back to the Myth that stands at the beginning of that History. The destruction of Númenor and the bending of the straight way between Middle-earth and Faërie mark the point of meeting and of transition.

Of course, the idea of a cataclysmic moment of change is a poetic expression of a representative event (viz. the road to Faërie becoming metaphorical). Barfield's theory itself points to a gradual process, as suggested by the following observation from one of the characters in the 'Notion Club Papers' (the reworking of 'The Lost Road' undertaken in the 1940s): "...if one could go back, one would find not myth dissolving into history, but rather the reverse: real history becoming more mythical"(Sauron 227; emphases added).

From this perspective, the Third Age, the shape of which evidently emerged in Tolkien's imagination not long after penning the first chapters of 'The Lost Road', is the same moment of transition expanded into an entire age of Middle-earth. In this expansion the destruction of Númenor marks only the beginning of a story, the end of which is marked by the departure from Middle-earth of Frodo and the last Elves. As such, the whole of the Third Age is a period of transition, during the whole of which Myth blends with History, and a man may walk in legends on the green earth in daylight.

So the two ships coming to and departing from Middle-earth - the one bearing Elendil, the other Frodo - frame this period of transition. This frame is seen by Frodo in the mirror of Galadriel, but is also alluded to in his dream at Crickhollow. For in this dream Frodo sees the Elf-tower that, as we know, held first the Seeing-Stone, associated with Elendil and looking back to an earlier Mythical age, and then the Red Book, associated with Frodo and carried forward from the beginning of History to our own day (the Red Book performing in reverse the time-travel of Albion and Audoin).

Flieger helps us go much further. For her analysis of Lothlórien shows that Tolkien incorporated Dunne's dream theory into The Lord of the Rings. Most obviously, Galadriel's mirror provides the perspective of the ultimate observer, able to see, not only past, present, and future, but also all places (e.g. Sam's vision of the Shire). But Lothlórien itself, as Flieger convincingly argues, is itself inside a dream - a 'Faërien Drama' in which the ancient days of Myth still live in the present (AQT 192-3). Now, her analysis of Frodo's dreams aside (which, ultimately, do suggest that Frodo's entire journey is a form of waking dream), Flieger stops here, content with showing the trouble that Tolkien took over the juxtaposition of normal and Elven time in the passage into and out of Lothlórien. But in light of our identification of the whole of the Third Age as an extended moment of transition between ancient Myth and present History we can see that in The Lord of the Rings Lothlórien is but an ideal type of the whole of Middle-earth - a place where Myth still lingers and interpenetrates with waking life. This, I suggest, is the key to the 'magical' nature of the Middle-earth of The Lord of the Rings.

Middle-earth, as we encounter it in LOTR, is a place of recognizable historical peoples (most notably, the Shire and Rohan) situated on a green earth saturated with an ancient Mythical past. This past extends back through the early years of the Third Age (the Elf-towers on the borders of the Shire, the Barrow Downs, the dead faces seen within the Dead Marshes), through the Second Age (Sauron and many things Elvish), and back to the very first "days before the days" (the watcher in the water at Moria, the Balrog in Moria, Mirrormere, the Ents and the Old Forest and - eldest of all - Tom Bombadil). Such places and things are usually (not always) encountered in one dream-like state or another. Thus, and as Tom Hillman brilliantly shows, dreams and dream-like states are not confined to Frodo's various dreams before Bree but are rather a continually and - crucially - variably evoked feature of the hobbits' journey from the Shire to Mordor (and back again).

In other words, while Tolkien began with Dunne's theory of dreams as a method of time travel from the present back to the age of Myth, in LOTR he came to use this theory as a way of fusing Myth and History on a journey through space. Dream and dream-like states become a major (perhaps the dominant) psychic form by which the ordinary mind moves through and experiences pockets of Myth. At the same time, Tolkien externalizes Dunne's theory (which, as Flieger reminds us, is a theory of space-time rather than just time) by endowing objects (and at least some Elves) with the property to bestow (or of) far-sight - the Palantíri, Galadriel's mirror (which shows other places as well as times), the Ring, at least when worn by Frodo on Amon Hen, and the Eye of Sauron itself. Here Dunne's theory is used to endow objects with a mythical magic - albeit a lower form of magic than the vision of other times.

Such a claim of course demands substantiation. Such substantiation requires careful textual readings of the kind provided on our Wiki pages on far-sight, dreams, and the journey from Crickhollow to the Barrow Downs. Whether or not such readings of LOTR do indeed substantiate this thesis - and, whether or not others will agree that it does - remains to be seen.

Thesis summary: By way of his vision of the destruction of Númenor, Tolkien established a turning-point in the temporal vision of Myth transforming into History that he derived from Owen Barfield. In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien expanded this moment of transition from a single catastrophe to an entire age - the Third Age, which he envisaged as a period in which Myth haunts and interpenetrates History. Having derived the idea of the destruction of Númenor while devising an abortive story of time-travel from the present to the days of Myth, and having envisaged time-travel by means of W.J. Dunne's theory of dreams, Tolkien proceeded to utilize Dunne's theory in order to realize his vision of a world half-way between Myth and History. Dunne's theory, in other words, provided the basis of the 'magic' of Middle-earth.